Health Justice Now by Tim Faust

"So the question to me is not: can we afford this? It's not even: can we afford not to afford this? It's: this wealth has been stolen from us; this wealth has been stolen from the people of Earth; are we not entitled to collectively benefit from it? Otherwise - when the companies come whispering ruby promises of prosperity, when they drain our land and exhaust our labor, when they disappear to some other place where they can do the same thing cheaper - are we just to clutch our children and suffer silently through the night?"

At some point, about 2 years ago now, I stumbled into becoming a single-payer healthcare activist. It's helpful to surround yourself with all the arguments and facts swirling around out there and luckily there is no shortage of that on the issue of healthcare; single-payer is something we've been trying to do in this country for a long time. I picked up Health Justice Now by Timothy Faust hoping to find a healthcare activist bible, an ultimate collection of, as Faust himself puts it, "nerd shit".

To be clear, Faust delivers on plenty of nerd shit. Health Justice Now outlines our current healthcare system and everything that's wrong with it, what our solutions are for fixing it, and asks us to imagine what might come to pass if our country ever gets its act together on healthcare.

What impressed me so much about this book was how simple its prescription (heh) for our gigantic failure is. Faust argues that human beings are messy and sick, that we will always be messy and sick, and that we (as a S O C I E T Y) should just give them healthcare, no questions asked. What's more, we should stop trying to strive for this magical system where we pinpoint resources at a select few deserving individuals:

"Thus, the dream of a private insurer is a large and uneventuful customer base. A risk-less risk pool. A million cutomers who pay their premiums every month and who never get hepatitis or get into car accidents or get other expernsive conditions. But this corporate-utopian vision doesn't reflect the way illnes works: there are simply always going to be a bunch of people who get sick or who need expensive care. Because the insurer doesn't have the ability to make sick people well, or to prevent illness or accidents in its customers, and absent the ability to just imagine away the customers who cause most of the medical costs, all the private insurer can do is find ways to kick out sick customers, or coerce them into leaving"

This is where Health Justice Now begins to reshape political philosophy. Faust isn't only able to prove that universal programs like single-payer are more effective using his cadre of "nerd shit", he's able to argue that they're more compassionate and humanizing. He helps you understand what making something a "human right" actually means.

I'll admit, I took for granted what making something human right means. But thanks to Faust's reminder in Health Justice Now, I don't think we've made nearly enough things human rights. Our attempt at only delivering social good to those we imagine deserve it has given way to disastrous experiments in means-testing, austerity, and a great forgetting of large swaths of the American public that don't seem to fit our narrative.

I did not imagine that, at the end of this book, I would be reshaping my understanding of justice to encompass all people. Shaking every preconception of conditional inclusion in a just society and jumping up and down after finishing it screaming "an obstacle to one is an obstacle to all". But here we are! Health Justice Now is life-affirming and has the propensity to be very influential to your world view. Read it.

This Life by Martin Hagglund

"Service to God may take the form of caring for the poor and destitute, but the goal is not to emancipate the poor so that they can flourish on the basis of their own evolving commitments and lead their free, finite lives as ends in themselves. The goal of reigious salvation is not to emancipate our finite lives but to save us from the finitude that is the condition of our freedom. As soon as emancipation becomes the goal, we have moved from a religious to a secular practice of care in which our aim is freedom and not salvation. We do not seek liberation from finite life, but rather the liberation of finite life"

This Life by Martin Hagglund basically argues we're all actually atheists and because of that we should be socialists...it's compelling as hell. 

The argument is that we all, at least implicitly, adhere to what Hagglund calls secular faith: "secular faith is a condition of intelligibility for any form of care. For anything to be intelligible as mattering - for anything to be at stake - we have to believe in the irreplaceable value of someone or something that is finite. The secular faith - which the religious aspiration to eternity seeks to leave behind - is expressed by care for anyone or anything living on. Secular faith is a condition of possibility for commitment and engagement, but by the same token secular faith leaves us open to devastation and grief". 

The entire first section of This Life trots out really famous and likable religious thinkers and writers like Martin Luther King Jr. or C.S. Lewis to demonstrate their commitment to the finite lives of everyone around them. This, Hagglund argues, is contrary to a religious faith that dictates our only concern should be for an afterlife. If we truly believed everyone in our lives would live forever what purpose would there be in valuing them? In feeling concern for their suffering? 

Imagine if your car couldn't be destroyed or damaged in any way, would you still drive it and value it as carefully? A less surface-level example: if we thought that our time with our elderly grandparent was infinite - that we'd just see them in the afterlife - would we really make such an effort to spend time with them before their passing?

Once you've been made to understand that we only have one life, Hagglund hits you with the second part of the book; we need to commit ourselves to the task of democratic socialism. This is what Hagglund defines as spiritual freedom. Spiritual freedom is essentially the freedom to pursue what you find most important in life without the constraints of necessary labor. If we only have one life, democratic socialism is the only structural way we can organize society to ensure the most amount of people can live that one life to its fullest. 

This section probably won't treat ardent Marxists to anything new (in fact some may disagree with Hagglund's definition of social value), but I've never seen such a severe argument for free time. As someone who lives in and is aware of a society that functions on the miserable toil of unnecessary labor the idea of redefining our understanding of freedom because we're all gonna die is...something. I'm not really sure how to win the world Hagglund is talking about but he certainly does a hell of a job inspiring me to believe in it.

This leads to my only criticism of Hagglund's work. While it's exciting to see an entire chapter dedicated to Democratic Socialism in such a philosophically rigorous book, it's disappointing to find it doesn't mention the concept of class struggle even one time. Hagglund goes on at length about the shortcoming of many liberal thinkers like Rawls and Mills, Marxist critics like Hayek, all the way to contemporary voices on the left like Naomi Klein and Thomas Piketty and how they fail to correctly redefine Capitalism's measure of value.

Hagglund isn't wrong to do this, in fact, I think his analysis is spot on, it's just that without mentioning how we struggle to win such a conception of value trivializes the problem to one of mere definitions. I'm not going to go to the UAW picket line and ask that the workers there reconceptualize their views on wage labor. I'm going to stand with them and demand more democratic freedom in the workplace. Do their demands fit into Hagglund's? We'll never know. 

But that doesn't really matter, Hagglund's book is an incredibly useful tool in realizing the value of one's life and prioritizing a definition of "freedom" that is actually achievable and that actually means something. While it doesn't offer the best insights on how to get involved in the struggle for such freedom, I still think the argument being made is one that should be shared as widely as possible. 

Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace

I recently read the short story collection Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace. The unique aspect of this collection stems from setting almost every story in real moments that occurred in history. The collection reminds you why DFW is a true fiction craftsman but also gave way to some unsettling realizations I have about the author.

The first story - the best IMO - "Little Expressionless Animals" shows DFW at his best. Dancing between reality and fiction, the story outlines the journey of an exceptional Jeopardy contestant and her love affair with the producer's daughter. The constant blurring of that line of what is real and what is not highlights how ridiculous reality can be how. It's fun, thoughtful, and brilliantly composed.

From there the reader is greeted with the collection's title story "Girl with Curious Hair". The piece features realistic settings and concepts but seriously fucks with characterization. It follows a gang of absolute monsters in their exploits in arson, drug exploration, assault, and more. Very reminiscent of a Clock Work Orange.

It's here the collection starts to lose me a bit. I'm not so sure in our time of intolerable cruelty I need to be reading DFW's reality-bending fiction. I'm not saying I want to be comforted by my fiction, but the cruelty displayed in this story tied with the mess of misogyny, racism, and overall power struggles in the stories to come don't need to make you second guess whether men and women are capable of such things.

In the final and longest story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way", we're treated to exploratory dialogue on the nature of fiction itself. I get the sense that without a certain amount of off-putting edge DFW feels fiction is little more than a glorified advertisement, meant to make readers feel good. So he strives to make his readers uneasy; characterizing women as impossibly particular, making his characters disfigured in some way, gratuitous violence.

The thing is we never explore why making a character transgender or disabled makes readers uneasy, why playing to these stereotypes and biases for the purpose creeping your readers out is actually harmful in the greater scheme (ironically DFW complained about David Lynch doing this exact thing with Richard Pryor in his review of Lost Highway). One could argue this isn't the point of the fiction, but then what is the point?

Interventions by Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky remains cogent as ever in his old age. He's still giving interviews, appearing on Democracy Now, writing, etc. Still, because there are so few voices countering hegemonic US foreign policy the prospect of losing Chomsky is truly depressing. Or it was before reading his book of op-eds Interventions and realizing that time is indeed a flat circle and anything Chomsky has said will apply to all of the exact same things for the rest of time.

For example, tell me if this sounds at all familiar:

"Washington's thorniest problem in the region is Venezuela, which provides nearly 15 percent of US oil imports. President Hugo Chavez, elected in 1998, displays the kind of independence that the United States translates as defiance...in 2002, Washington embraced President Bush's vision of democracy by supporting a military coup that very briefly overturned the Chavez Government. The Bush administration had to back down, however, because of opposition to the coup throughout Latin America and the quick reversal of the coup by a popular uprising".

Interventions is a collection of op-eds by Chomsky during (and in the leadup to) the Iraq War. While each one is short, they work to build a countervailing narrative that we all know now to be true. The takeaway here is not just that Chomsky is right, but rather how easy it is to be right.

US foreign policy is extremely formulaic. Since World War II the US will work discretely to cause unrest in a region in order to apply their disaster capitalist tactics toward privatization, they'll accuse any challenging nation (no matter how small) of being an existential threat, and they'll make up any number of reasons to execute an occupation if necessary.

In reading Interventions, one understands that Chomsky's entire body of work documents this strategy time and time again. It serves as a reminder that we can look to Chomsky and those like him any time state conflict approaches. In the year 2019, as our nation creeps closer to an extended military conflict with Iran, we only have to glance at Chomky's writings on the failure to find Bin-Laden, the source of the post-9/11 anthrax terror, or the Iraqi WMDs:

"for the second 9/11 anniversary and beyond, we basically have two choices. We can march forward with confidence that the global enforcer will drive evil from the world, much as the president's speechwriters declare, plagiarizing ancient epics and children's tales. Or we can subject the doctrine of the proclaimed grand new era to scrutiny, drawing rational conclusions, perhaps gaining some sense of the emerging reality".

As concerned citizens, we owe this level of scrutiny to Chomsky. I wouldn't start out with Interventions as your introductory text, but it definitely makes a great piece to a larger collection.

The Current Affairs Rules for Life by Nathan Robinson

The way I see it you could find yourself in either one of these two categories:

1. You think all the criticism of social justice warriors is valid and people just need to learn to contend with ideas they don't like 
2. You don't think the criticism of social justice warriors is valid but you have neither the time nor patience to analyze the work of popular critics like Jordan Peterson or Steven Pinker and adequately refute their arguments 

I've been in both these categories. There was a time I gave in to popular sentiment and assumed leftists, especially college leftists, were being too sensitive. I thought things like safe spaces, microaggressions, and trigger warnings were taking the idea of egalitarianism to hypersensitive levels and made it too easy to parody. I was even one of those insufferable free speech purists who felt that credible arguments exist on all sides of a given argument and, if we could only hear them all out, the most rational outcome would prevail (which isn't necessarily wrong, I just failed to grasp that the arguments presented to us in mainstream discourse were just two sides of the same coin).    

As I began moving further to the left after college (this is what working in a cubicle 40 hours a week will do to you) I could start to see major power imbalances being challenged by the same leftists I criticized. And they weren't just challenging them with trigger warnings or microaggressions (though they were certainly present) but rather with visions of a just and more fair outcome for all. These were the people being referred to as SJWs or Social Justice Warriors and written off as "snowflakes". 

A lot of people in my life still subscribe to the theory that social justice is a concept gone too far and they're still heavily influenced by the harshest critics. Joe Rogan hosts the most popular podcast in the world and he uses it to platform many like-minded critics of the left. People like Sam Harris, David Brooks, and Steven Pinker are seen as rational classical liberals and attract justice-minded people with a perceived evenhandedness. Pseudo-academics like Jordan Peterson and Charles Murray will use the real language of science or statistics to legitimize ideas with no real scientific or statistical backing. And of course, there are those on the right like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and Milo Yiannopoulos who reasoned people will often say they disagree with while simultaneously insisting on the existence of good faith in their arguments.  

Rather than take on these people and critiques on our own I think it is time to elevate those voices who can best critically defend social justice. I would like to nominate Nathan Robinson, who edits the magazine Current Affairs and whose collection of essays The Current Affairs Rule for Life offers key insights into the real arguments behind both social justice and its critics. 

If I were describing a Ben Shapiro YouTube video I would describe Part One of the books as "Nathan Robinson Eats Anti-SJW With The Teeth of Logic and Shits Th-". You get it. Each essay tracks a popular social justice critic, fairly defines their major beef with the movements and ideation of the left, and then either provides a lawyerly, well-evidenced counterpoint or exposes them as only speciously engaging with leftist arguments at all. The gang is all here; Peterson, Harris, Carlson, Brooks and more. The level of engagement is useful in its substance as well as its timeliness.

 Part Two goes on to defend the idea of social justice as a whole. Rather than describe each argument in detail, here is a taste of the central theme from the essay In Defense of Social Justice:

"Why is the left-wing political agenda so hopelessly muddled and varied? Redistributing wealth, eliminating gender roles, protecting the environment, stopping the war, prosecuting Wall Street, opening the borders, saving the Louisiana pancake batfish—why do we just throw all of this different stuff together into the political equivalent of a KFC Famous Bowl® and call it social justice? What is this, other than a series of different ways to signal one’s virtue? But the premise of the question is wrong, because it looks only at the goals that follow from a certain set of basic values and misses the values themselves. It’s understandable that people get confused, because on the left we end up spending far more time talking about what we want than the reasons we want it. It’s still true, however, that there is a coherent (and to me, compelling) philosophy underlying “left-wing social justice politics.” It starts from a belief that other people matter, that we should empathize with the rest of humanity and care about what happens to them as much as we care about what happens to ourselves. It also holds a vision of the good life, a life where people have freedom and equality. But it realizes that those need to be more than empty feel-good words: Freedom means the actual capacity to do things, not the mere absence of physical restraint"

All of the essays are available online, but I highly suggest subscribing to Current Affairs or at least purchasing the book. This is part of that "elevating voices" thing I was talking about. Whether you're sending these essays to people or just reading them to equip yourself with better arguments, I can't stress how important projects like Current Affairs are (Robinson makes a lot of references to other writers I'll be reading too). With the growing popularity of the anti-left, the left needs better messaging and better arguments, which will require complex engagement with the anti-left talking points. 

Robinson's trick to this engagement is giving serious consideration to what your target is saying, really knowing/being able to speak to the values backing them up, as well as...just reading them. During the Kavanaugh hearings, I kept his essay on the Supreme Court nominee's testimony permanently up on my phone. What made it such a useful piece? Well, Robinson actually read the testimony and painstakingly combed for inconsistencies in it. Every day, ordinary social justice critics in our lives have professional critics on the center-left and right popularizing and normalizing their ideas. Let's make people like Nathan Robinson ours, let's let him read their screeds for us so we can develop our own way of combating those advocating brutal individualism. He's like that nerd in high school that will do your homework for you except this time you don't even need to threaten him with a wedgie, you just need to subscribe to his magazine.